WTKR and WGNT get a high five for casting globally by streaming locally. This is something they can do, but the Weather Channel cannot, because it’s tied up with obligations to broadcast live only over cable. Local stations aren’t encumbered by the same obligations, outside of network programming. (They just used some uStream video from cage-free journalists in North Carolina, and keep thanking their Facebook friends, which is cool. Some props should go to blogs and tweets too, though.)

[Later…] Here is a list of all TV stations now streaming live on the Net:

Got an interesting email from sister Jan, retired Commander with the U.S. Navy, who was stationed in Newport when Hurricane Bob hit in 1991. With her permission, here it is:

It was almost exactly 20 years ago that I rode out the direct hit Bob made on Newport. As I recall, Bob had flirted with the entire East Coast, waving at Miami to Cape May while eluding the weathermen who wanted the story in their backyard. When it turned ENE away from NJ and the I-95 corridor the story died out. That was on Friday evening. The Weather Channel, and Cable, were still young; so if the networks didn’t see a story, most of us didn’t hear the story because to them there was no story.

Sunday afternoon, as I was getting ready to leave Mom in Providence, we heard on the radio that Bob was coming back toward NE, and Cape Cod looked like it might be in the cross-hairs. By the 6 PM news, we were in the larger target area, and the run on supplies had started. Since I lived in a huge 150-year-old mansion (at the highest point in town) I told everyone to come on over, and we’d ride it out there. By 5 AM monday, we knew that Block Island, the Narragansett Bay and Newport would probably be at ground zero.

Funny, the day of Bob was downright weird. The storm was tight — there wasn’t a breath of wind at 9 AM. We were stressed waiting, but around noon we were hearing that Block Island was probably going to get a direct hit, and so would we. And boy, did we ever. All my New Jersey memories of hurricanes were that they came at night. But because Bob came through in the middle of the day, I think the experience was very memorable, and a lot more impressive and nerve-wracking. As I remember …

21 people and a cocker spaniel at my place, eating everything in our cumulative kitchens that might spoil. Wired from adrenaline and drinking gallons of coffee.

When the eye went over, everyone, including the dog, fell asleep for at least 5 minutes. It was the flower fields outside Oz all over again. Pressure change, we were told. Happened to a lot of folks. But talk about weird.

We watched the 15′ of top of a pine tree zip down Old Beach Rd. like a cruise missile at an altitude of 20′ max.

We watched the huge 100+ yr. flowering chestnuts whipping in the wind, flinging their spiky nuts like mini-balls all over the place. Some were later found embedded in the stucco of the house. (Later in the fall, the tops of those trees were celebrating a false spring while the lower part were fully autumn.

After the eye went by (came in directly over the house — we saw blue — the storm petered out quickly and we went out to walk around. There wasn’t a spot of pavement to see – everything was covered in leaves and limbs and debris.

No power, of course, but the outage was everywhere. Restoration was in an ever decreasing circle and my place was last. Eight days after the storm, the radio said all power was restored with the exception of the Rhode Island Ave/Old Beach Rd. intersection. That was me.

They had to use snowplows in some cases to clear the streets and for the rest of Aug and Sept the streets of Newport were like country lanes — lovely packed leaf and twig crush for a roadbed.

The collected debris was piled in the parking lot on the beach at the bottom of Memorial Boulevard, and it was about 20′ high and 40′ wide, running the full 1000′ length of the lot. After waiting for what seemed like weeks for the right off-shore winds, they started the burning and it seemed to go on forever.

Someone forgot to cash in, so we never saw an I Survived Bob tee shirt.

Could be Newport will be in the cross-hairs again with Hurricane Irene. That’s what one model currently predicts, but the others all vector in west of there. (Here’s a current map.)

I normally avoid talking politics here, but it’s hard to stay quiet while partisans on the left help with the demolition project that partisans on the right started the moment Barack Obama arrived in the White House.

“Every single person nodded, including the Republicans,” reported one observer.

At a luncheon in the members’ dining room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday, a 64-year-old African-American from the Bronx was complaining about Obama’s ineffectiveness in dealing with the implacable hostility of congressional Republicans when an 80-year-old lawyer chimed in about the president’s unwillingness to stand up to his opponents. “I want to see blood on the floor,” she said grimly.

A 61-year-old white woman at the table nodded. “He never understood about the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy,’” she said.

The country needs the president to rise to this crisis in word, spirit and deed. We need him to reach out of his nature and into the nation’s need. We are on the precipice. There’s growing concern that we may slip into a second, more painful recession. There is little optimism that the housing crisis will loosen its grip on the economy anytime soon. The unspeakable truth is that we may well be on the leading edge of a prolonged period of national stagnation, if not decline.

A robotic Sustainer-in-Chief with an eerie inhumanity will not satisfy. At this moment, we need less valley and more mountaintop.

Oh please.

He’s not Moses, and that’s not his job. He’s the President. He presides. He doesn’t rule. We gave him an awful job, and he’s doing it with dignity, sobriety, intelligence, and a variety of other personal and administrative virtues that were absent or compromised in the prior two administrations.

In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation’s broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it.

A goof with truth.

It doesn’t matter if there’s a right-wing conspiracy (which there is). The right wing doesn’t need a conspiracy while it remains what it became in the age of Fox News and talk radio: an uncompromising partisan bloc devoted utterly to defeating its political opponents, as a Prime Directive. The GOP is hardly unified in all its positions, but as a partisan bloc all its guns have been aimed since 2008 at President Obama, and they haven’t stopped firing. Meanwhile folks on the left have convened a circular firing squad, with their Main Man in the middle.

If Hillary had won, she’d be there now too, because she’d be disappointing the left just as much as Obama is. She’d have to, because she’d be President, and not just a candidate.

The Republicans have also hated Hillary far longer than they’ve hated Obama, and for all the same reasons: she’s a tax & spend Liberal who prefers Big Hands-on Government to the smaller Hands-off kind (that lives as an ideal in the collective Republican mind, even though we’ve haven’t had it in anybody’s living memory, or maybe ever). It wouldn’t matter if she was “tougher.” Her opposition would be just as uncooperative, hostile and determined to drive her from office. Absolute unity and intransigence on Core Principles is the GOP’s chemo for the body politic: it will kill off the cancer of leftism before it kills the country.

So the Republicans are succeeding, with help from Democratic outlets like Daily Beast and HuffPo, whose constituencies are tiny fractions of populations that Murdoch outlets and their amen corners on talk radio preach to every day.

Not saying folks on the left should shut up about Obama; just that they should look at the hand he was dealt in the first place, plus what the guy is up against and what his job is. Pleasing his core on the left isn’t Job One, or even Job Ten. Running a country that risks devolving into misery and chaos is Job One.

Personally, I don’t think anybody can do it, because our system is rigged against it. (And, for what it’s worth, I’m a registered Independent whose usual inclination is to vote for None of the Above.)

Anyway, if you want to help the country, go after Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman. Because that’s who you’ll get in 2012 if Obama loses.

I’ve been digging around for stuff I blogged (or wrote somewhere on the Web) way back when. After finding two items I thought might be lost, I decided to point to them here, which (if search engines still work the Old Way) might make them somewhat easier to find again later.

I went through my own head-scratching epiphany right after the Web got hot and I found my profession had changed from writer to “content provider.” What was that about? Were my words going to be shrink-wrapped, strapped on a skid and sold in bulk at Costco?

No, “content” was just a handy way to label anything you could “package” and “deliver” through the “vehicle” of this wonderful new “medium.” Marketers were salivating at the chance to “target,” “capture” and “penetrate” ever-more-narrow “audiences” with ever-more-narrow “messages.” Never mind that there was zero demand at the receiving end for any of it. (If you doubt the math, ask what you’d be willing to pay to see an ad on the Web. Or anywhere.)

Soon I began to wonder what had happened to markets, which for thousands of years were social places where people got together to buy and sell stuff, and to make civilization. By the end of the Industrial Age, every category you could name was a “market.” So was every region and every demographic wedge where there was money to be spent. Worse, these were all too often conceived as “arenas” and “battlefields,” even though no growing category could be fully described in the zero-sum terms of sports and war metaphors.

And from the latter:

Cluetrain talks far less about what markets need that about what they are. The first thesis says Markets are conversations. Not markets need to be conversations. Or people need the right message. In fact, we make the point that there is no market for messages. If you want to see how little people want messages, look at the MUTE button on your TV’s remote control. Sum up all marketing sentiment on the receiving end and you’ll find negative demand for it.

There’s nothing conversational about a message. I submit that if a message turns into a conversation, it isn’t a message at all. It’s a topic.

Not many people noticed (including me, until Jakob Nielsen pointed it out) that The Cluetrain Manifesto was written in first and second person plural voices, and was addressed not by marketers to markets, but by markets to marketers. It said —

if you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get…

Chris Locke wrote that in early 1999. Marketing still doesn’t get it. Maybe it can’t.

And, because marketing (and the rest of business) didn’t get it, I started ProjectVRM, and am now finishing a book about customer liberation and why free customers will prove more valuable than captive ones.

You can see flights avoiding the storm as it approaches the airport, which is just above the “BO” in KBOS.

It’s just a summer thunderstorm. Nothing exceptional. It’s just fun to watch it online in all these places as well as from a chair on my front porch.

… And now, a few minutes later, the sun is out and we have rainbows in Cambridge. Meanwhile, flights are taking off from Logan, while inbound flights circle in the sky to the east:

By the way, also at FlightAware, there’s this notice: “Boston Logan Intl (KBOS) is currently experiencing inbound flights delayed at their origin an average of 1 hour 33 minutes due to thunderstorms.” So if you’re coming here for the weekend, good luck.

The Rock face of the Music Radio island is eroding away, as station after station falls into the vast digital sea. Here’s a story in Radio Ink about how two FM rockers have been replaced by news and sports broadcasts that were formerly only on the AM band. (The illo for the story is a hideously discolored mug shot of the aged Mick Jagger.) But Rock isn’t the only music format that’s in trouble. All of them are.

For most of the last century, music and music radio were Xtreme symbiotes. To be popular, or just to be known to more than your local club or coffee house, you had to get your music on the radio. (For some great cinematic history on this, rent Coal Miner’s Daughter, just to see how Loretta Lynn established herself as a singer.) That’s because you also needed to sell what the radio played, which were recordings. All of those were on plastic discs.

Most music we hear is no longer on discs, or even on the radio.

Radio’s biggest advantage since the beginning was being live. This is why it’s still essential for talk, and especially for news and sports — the three formats that are winning on FM and keeping AM alive. Radio will remain strong as long as Internet streaming stays complicated (which it is, even on smartphones), and radios remain standard equipment in new cars. But music radio is still dying slowly. Three reasons:

Music on radio is rarely presented by connoisseurs who know more than you do, and you’re glad to learn from. This in fact has been the case for a long time. There remain a few exceptions, but none (to my knowledge) make much money. By contrast, the Net is full of music connoisseurs and connoisseur-like offerings (e.g. Pandora, LastFM, Spotify).

You don’t choose what music you want to hear. You can do that with Spotify or Rhapsody, and to a lesser extent with Pandora and LastFM.

Advertising. We used to have no choice about enduring it. Now we do.

But music dying on the radio doesn’t mean it lives on the Net. At least not in the form of radio stations as we’ve known them. That’s because of copyright laws.

Radio has huge legacy legal advantages over all-digital alternatives on the copyright front. I won’t go into the details, because they’re complicated beyond endurance, but suffice it to say there is a reason why there are no podcasts of popular music. (Briefly, it’s that the podcaster would have to “clear rights” with the copyright holder of every song.) All we get is “podsafe” music, and music from outfits like the ones mentioned above, which have worked their own broad licensing deals with copyright holders — and from radio stations that enjoy similar deals and happen to stream as well.

Note that radio stations pay more, per recording, to copyright holders for streaming than they do for broadcasting on the air. But they get a break on the streaming side if they’re already broadcasting music over the air, because they don’t have to clear rights with all the artists they play.

The key here is the term “performance.” The way the law (in the U.S. at least) is set up, every play of every recording on the radio or over the Net is considered a performance, and the assumption by the copyright absolutists (the RIAA, primarily) is that copyright holders need to be paid for those performances. And they’ve been putting the squeeze in recent years on music radio to pay as much for performance rights as streamers on the Internet have been forced to pay. (They put those shackles on the Internet radio baby, right in the cradle.) This will also have a chilling effect on music radio.

So an irony of considering recorded music a “performance,” for the purpose of extracting royalties from radio stations on the Net and over the air, is that music on both is either going away or turning toward new systems, such as Spotify, LastFM, Pandora and the rest. But no new radio stations, on either the airwaves or the Net. Not if they’re going to play music of the RIAA-protected kind, which is most of what we know.

If the record industry were not immune to clues, it would find ways to open up opportunities for new music radio stations on the Net. But I doubt they will, until FM music is on its deathbed, just like it’s been on AM since FM wounded it.

My parents, Eleanor and Allen Searls, were married 65 years ago today. The wedding was in Grace United Methodist Church, in Minneapolis.* Mom’s family, all descendents of Swedish immigrants to homesteads in Minnesota and North Dakota, were the primary attendees, as I recall being told. Pop’s family was from New Jersey, and that’s where the couple settled down and raised their family. Additions were myself, a bit less than a year later, and my sister Jan, another 20 months after that.

We were lucky kids. Our parents were good, sane, loving, smart, hard-working and convivial people. Our home was a safe and happy one. We had lots of family gatherings, and lots of friends in our town and around the little summer place Pop and uncle Archie Apgar built on the edge of the Pine Barrens in South Jersey. For us that place was paradise.

Mom and Pop are gone now, but the family is still intact. We celebrated my birthday at Pop’s little sister Grace’s place in Maine two weekends ago. She’s 99 now, and doing great. (Here’s a photo set from that trip. All the shots of me in that set were ones Grace shot. As you can see, I enjoyed the company.)

Easy to imagine. Now that Google has “gone hardware” and “gone vertical” with the Motorola deal, why not do the same in the mobile operator space? It makes sense.

According to Chunka, this new deal, and the apps on it,

…would destroy the fiction that internet, cellular and cable TV are separate, overlapping industries. In reality, they are now all just applications riding on top of the same platform. It is just that innovation has been slowed because two slices of those applications, phone and TV, are controlled by aging oligopolies.

AT&T and Verizon survive on the fiction that mobile text and voice are not just another form of data, and customers are charged separately (and exorbitantly) for them. They are also constraining mobile data bandwidth and usage, both to charge more and to manage the demand that their aging networks cannot handle.

Comcast, Time Warner Cable and other cable operators still profit from the fact that consumers have to purchase an entire programming package in order to get a few particular slices of content. This stems from the time when cable companies had a distribution oligopoly, and used that advantageous position to require expensive programming bundles. Computers, phones and tablets, of course, are now just alternative TV screens, and the Internet is an alternative distribution mechanism. It is just a matter of time before competitors unbundle content, and offer movies, sports, news and other forms of video entertainment to consumers.

The limiting factor to change has not been the technology but obsolete business models and the lack of competition.

Before Apple and Google came in, the mobile phone business was evolving at a geological pace. I remember sitting in a room, many years back, with Nokia honchos and a bunch of Internet entrepreneurs who had just vetted a bunch of out-there ideas. One of the top Nokia guys threw a wet blanket over the whole meeting when he explained that he knew exactly what new features would be rolled out on new phones going forward two and three years out, and that these had been worked out carefully between Nokia and its “partners” in the mobile operator business. It was like getting briefed on agreements between the Medici Bank and the Vatican in 1450.

Apple blasted through that old market like a volcano, building a big, vertical, open (just enough to invite half a billion apps) market silo that (together with app developers) completely re-defined what a smartphone — and any other handheld device — can do.

But Apple’s space was still a silo, and that was a problem Google wanted to solve as well. So Google went horizontal with Android, making it possible for any hardware maker to build anything on a whole new (mostly) open mobile operating system. As Cory Doctorowput it in this Guardian piece, Android could fail better, and in more ways, than Apple’s iOS.

But the result for Google was the same problem that Linux had with mobile before Android came along: the market plethorized. There were too many different Android hardware targets. While Android still attracted many developers, it also made them address many differences between phones by Samsung, Motorola, HTC and so on. As Henry Blodget put it here,

Android’s biggest weakness thus far has been its fragmentation: The combination of many different versions, plus many different customizations by different hardware providers, has rendered it a common platform in name only. To gain the full power of “ubiquity”–the strategy that Microsoft used to clobber Apple and everyone else in the PC era–Google needs to unify Android. And perhaps owning a hardware company is the only way to do that.

That’s in response to the question, “Is this an acknowledgment that, in smartphones, Apple’s integrated hardware-software solution is superior to the PC model of a common software platform crossing all hardware providers?” Even if it’s not (and I don’t think it is), Google is now in the integrated hardware-software mobile device business. And we can be sure that de-plethorizing Android is what Larry Page’s means when he talks about “supercharging” the Android ecosystem.

So let’s say the scenario that Chunka describes actually plays out — and then some. For example, what if Google buys, builds or rents fat pipes out to Sprint cell sites, and either buys or builds its way into the content delivery network (CDN) business, competing with while also supplying Akamai, Limelight and Level3? Suddenly what used to be TV finishes moving “over the top” of cable and onto the Net. And that’s just one of many other huge possible effects.

What room will be left for WISPs, which may be the last fully independent players out there?

I don’t know the answers. I do know that just the thought of Google buying Sprint will fire up the lawyers and lobbyists for AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG – News) and Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:MMI – News) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Google will acquire Motorola Mobility for $40.00 per share in cash, or a total of about $12.5 billion, a premium of 63% to the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares on Friday, August 12, 2011. The transaction was unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies.

The acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a dedicated Android partner, will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem and will enhance competition in mobile computing. Motorola Mobility will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. Google will run Motorola Mobility as a separate business.

Since its launch in November 2007, Android has not only dramatically increased consumer choice but also improved the entire mobile experience for users. Today, more than 150 million Android devices have been activated worldwide—with over 550,000 devices now lit up every day—through a network of about 39 manufacturers and 231 carriers in 123 countries. Given Android’s phenomenal success, we are always looking for new ways to supercharge the Android ecosystem. That is why I am so excited today to announce that we have agreed to acquire Motorola.

Motorola has a history of over 80 years of innovation in communications technology and products, and in the development of intellectual property, which have helped drive the remarkable revolution in mobile computing we are all enjoying today. Its many industry milestones include the introduction of the world’s first portable cell phone nearly 30 years ago, and the StarTAC—the smallest and lightest phone on earth at time of launch. In 2007, Motorola was a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance that worked to make Android the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. I have loved my Motorola phones from the StarTAC era up to the current DROIDs.

The bold-faces are mine.

First, note how Larry says Google is acquiring Motorola, rather than Motorola Mobility. That’s because mobility is the heart and soul of Motorola, Inc., which has been synonymous with mobile radio since the company was founded by Paul Galvin in 1928. Motorola, Inc.’s other division, Motorola Solutions, is big and blah, selling gear and services to business and government. Now that Motorola Solutions will be 100% of Motorola, Inc., it’s an open question where the Motorola name will go. Since Larry says Google bought Motorola, I’m guessing that the acquisition included the name. Nothing was said about it in either the release or the blog post, but it’s bound to be an issue. I hope somebody’s bringing it up in the shareholder webcast going on right now (starting 8:30 Eastern). If Google got the Motorola name, Motorola solutions will probably go the way of Accenture, which used to be Andersen Consulting.

At the very least, this is patent play. That’s why Larry talked about intellectual property. In mobile, Motorola (I’m guessing, but I’m sure I’m right) has a bigger patent portfolio than anybody else, going back to the dawn of the whole category. Oracle started a patent war a year ago by suing Google, and Google looked a bit weak in that first battle. So now, in buying Motorola, Google is building the biggest patent fort that it can. In that area alone, Google now holds more cards than anybody, especially its arch-rival, Apple.

Until now, Apple actually wasn’t a direct enemy of Google’s, since Google wasn’t in the hardware business. In fact, Android itself was hardly a business at all — just a way to open up the mostly-closed mobile phone business. But now Google is one of the biggest players in mobile hardware. The game changes.

For Google’s Android partners other than Motorola, this has to hurt. (Henry Blodget calls it a “stab in the back.”)

For Windows Mobile, it’s a huge win, because Microsoft is now the only major mobile operating systems supplier that doesn’t also own a hardware company.

David Drummond, Google’s legal chief: Android under threat from some companies, while I’m not prepped to talk strategies, combining with Motorola and having that portfolio to protect the ecosystem is a good thing.

Sanjay Jha: Over 17,000 issued, over 7,500 applications out there. Much better support to the businesses.

8:47: Android partners, a risk to them?

Andy Rubin: I spoke yesterday to top 5 licensees, all showed enthusiastic support. Android was born as an open system, doesn’t make sense to be a single OEM.

8:48: What convinced you this was optimal solution? Competencies that aren’t core to Google?

Larry Page: I’m excited about this deal, while competencies that aren’t core to us, we plan to operate as a separate business, excited about protecting the Android ecosystem.

We’ll see a lot of silly talk about Google getting direct into the handset business while the dust settles, but make no mistake: this purchase is all about Motorola’s patent portfolio. This is Google telling Apple and Microsoft and Oracle “You want to play silly-buggers with junk patents? Bring it on; we’ll countersue you into oblivion.”

Yes, $12 billion is a lot to pay for that privilege. But, unlike the $4.5 billion an Apple/Microsoft-led consortium payed for the Nortel patents not too long ago, that $12 billion buys a lot of other tangible assets that Google can sell off. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google’s expenditure on the deal actually nets out to less – and Motorola’s patents will be much heavier artillery than Nortel’s. Motorola, after all, was making smartphone precursors like the StarTac well before the Danger hiptop or the iPhone; it will have blocking patents.

I don’t think Google is going to get into the handset business in any serious way. It’s not a kind of business they know how to run, and why piss off all their partners in the Android army? Much more likely is that the hardware end of the company will be flogged to the Chinese or Germans and Google will absorb the software engineers. Likely Google’s partners have already been briefed in on this plan, which is why Google is publishing happy-face quotes about the deal from the CEOs of HTC, LG, and Sony Ericsson.

The biggest loser, of course, is Apple; it’s going to have to settle for an armed truce in the IP wars now. This is also a bad hit for Microsoft, which is going to have to fold up the extortion racket that’s been collecting more fees on HTC Android phones than the company makes on WP7. This deal actually drops a nuke on the whole tangle of smartphone-patent lawsuits; expect to see a lot of them softly and silently vanish away before the acquisition even closes.

I don’t think anybody has paid more attention to this whole thing than Eric has, and he brings the perspective of a veteran developer and open source operative as well. (Without Eric, we wouldn’t be talking about open source today.)

Android has been hugely advantageous for everyone who is a successful phone maker not named Apple. Remember, Apple’s premium smartphone holds up the pricing structure for the whole industry. Samsung, HTC and the rest have been selling phones into this market and pocketing huge margins because they pay nothing for Android.

Google wouldn’t be human if it didn’t want some of this loot, which buying Motorola would enable it to grab. But that doesn’t mean, in the long term or the short term, that other hardware makers will walk away from a relationship that has lined their pockets and propelled them to the top of the rapidly growing and giant new business of making smartphones. Let’s just say that while having Google as a competitor is not ideal, handset makers will learn to live with it.

Jenkins’ columns often rub me the wrong way, but this bit seems spot-on.